Like Horses: Capturing the sights and sounds of equestrian life

Over the past few months, we’ve featured several videos from the “Like Horses” webseries here on HorseChannel. These videos feature beautiful cinematography and, for the most part, no music or narration to disrupt the natural background sounds. The sounds of the barn are as much a part of each scene as the sights.

Filmmaker Julien Guntz of France is the creative eye behind these videos. He’s been generously sharing his work with us throughout the process, so when he sent the above season finale, I asked if he’d mind telling HorseChannel readers a bit more about this project.

At age 35, Guntz decided to pursue cinematography.

“I wanted to associate sounds and images in order to capture an ambiance for a video,” he explains. “Horses are perfect for that: Peaceful without many [other] sounds, just the sounds of a barn. I’m not a rider, but the ambiance seems familiar to me.”
When he created the first video in the series, Guntz didn’t realize how popular it would become with horse lovers around the world.

“The first episode was broadcast on Vimeo and reached 37,000 views,” he says. “So I decided to make a webseries to share my work with horse fans. [I wanted] to do it in an original way; a poetic way with just the original sounds. I always try to tell a story with just sounds and images.”

Many of the videos in the Like Horses series are filmed at the Waldhof Equestrian Center, a barn Guntz had visited with his father and sister years ago. Within the series, there’s also footage Guntz captured when he happened upon a harness horse being exercised during a walk on the beach (above). Another featured a field of draft horses he spotted while on vacation. For episode 7, he spent a day recording Thoroughbreds and trotters at the Strasbourg-Hoerdt racecourse.

Guntz uses a Canon 5D Mark II camera for filming and a Zoom H2n to record sound. Each episode typically takes two days of shooting and two days of editing to produce the finished product. The effort is starting to pay off, as the series now has more than 250 subscribers on YouTube and has reached more than 70,000 viewers.

“I’ve liked spending the past five months with horses,” says Guntz. “I’ve discovered the barn life, the racecourse life, and generally the world of horses with a huge variety of things to learn.”

If you’ve enjoyed the Like Horses series, be sure to subscribe to the Like Horses YouTube channel. He’s promised us a second season once he reaches 1,000 subscribers!

Leslie Potter is a writer, photographer, and Managing Web Editor for Horse Illustrated and Young Rider. Leslie is based in Lexington, Kentucky, where she nervously dabbles in eventing and dutifully feeds treats to her 30-year-old Morgan, Snoopy.